Valley Futures

Unless you’ve been living in the wilderness of the rural Vermont frontier, you probably have heard that uber-director James (Titanic and Aliens) Cameron is back with an incredible “game-changing” new film called “Avatar” that has imperial audiences and critics talking. Much has been made, and rightly so, of the movie’s brilliance: the creation of an entirely new language, for example, and the film’s iridescent three-dimensional visuality – a phenomenal spectacle – and well-worth seeing on the big screen. Equally interesting, though, is “Avatar’s” highly critical anti-imperial vision, dismissed by most mainstream critics, like the New Yorker’s David Denby, as little more than echoes of 1960s counter-culture. For anyone considering the United States as Empire, however, “Avatar’s” evocative and disturbing storyline – “Aliens” meets “Dances With Wolves” meets Lord of the Rings” – proves much more damning than not.

The story unfolds like this. Sometime in the future, a young and embittered U.S. ex-marine named Jake Sully (a convincing Sam Worthington) ships out to a remote mining colony called Pandora. Leg-less, Sully finds himself a mercenary working for the Company as a specially trained soldier who inhabits an “avatar,” a genetically hybridized creature designed to build relationships with the natives known as Na’Vi. Sully’s job is to “win hearts and minds,” as the old imperialistic propaganda goes. The Company’s ongoing goal? Profit-maximization through the pursuit of an element called “Unobtanium.” (I can see Cameron smiling.)

Tough-talking scientist Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) heads up the avatar program, and when she isn’t butting heads with the Company brass, she oversees training for Sully, who finds himself separated from his team on his first foray into the jungle. His life saved by a beautiful “barbarian,” he winds up in the hands of “the savages, and soon discovers that this indigenous community is defined by “the bond” – connections between all living things, The tall, lithe, tailed, blue, willowy creatures that Sully impersonates share a deep “hook up” (quite literally) to the stunning natural world of Pandora – cascading waterfalls, craggy chasms and canyons, and a diverse array of fascinating, marvelous (and ferocious) creatures.

The Omaticaya, as the natives call themselves, revere a mystical energetic force called Eywa, an animist Spirit that infuses all living things. “I have come to learn,” says Sully/Avatar to the “hostiles” at his first meeting. “It is hard to teach the Sky People,” one of the Na’Vi leaders responds. “It is hard to fill a vessel that is already full.” Sully soon finds himself torn between his attraction for the Na’Vi and their chief’s beautiful daughter, and his official avatar/marine mission – to convince the Na’Vi to move their village off of one of the largest Unobtanium deposits in the area. His training in “the flow of energy” and “spirits of animals” (“tree hugging crap,” Sully calls it at first) is by turns humorous and breath-takingly beautiful, helped along by the 3D/CGI throw down and the boundless imagination of Cameron and his team.

Most compelling, perhaps, is the oddly deja-vu-like quality of “Avatar.” Thematically, the scenes in the film – helicopter gunships thrashing down onto the green underbrush, muscled military men hoisting gigantic weapons, and the like – are eerie-ly reminiscent of moments from the Vietnam “police action” or dozens of other “theaters” of conflict that defined the 20th century, history’s bloodiest, and are quickly moving to define this next one. In the Age of Twitter, this time writer Wallace Stegner once called “the amputated present,” we are quick to forget our own history of violence against “the natives” and nature itself, and Cameron’s film brings back this history with disturbing three-dimensional vividness. By the time the rock-hard Company commander issues a “preemptive strike against the aboriginal horde” (“We will fight terror with terror,” he snarls) in an attempt to “blow a huge hole in their racial memory,” Cameron makes it clear to the point of cliché what histories he is retelling. When Sully and a small band of rogue Company employees decide to “go native” and mount an organized resistance campaign, it is hard not to stand up, remove the 3D glasses, and cheer.

How “Avatar” plays out I will not reveal here. The ultimate irony, perhaps, for Sully and for us all, is this: as we destroy the real world – beautiful, connected, sacred, organic – the only “place” many of us think we can retreat to is the world of networked electronic technology (Second Life, anyone?), itself a “Cyberia” created by the mining of the planet’s natural yet finite resources.

The ultimate form of Imperialism.

And it takes a Hollywood director to shock us back into our senses.

“All energy is borrowed,” Sully learns from his nubile and gifted young teacher, “and one day you must give it back.”

Bingo.

As we enter the 21st century and “the age of limits,” truer words have not been spoken.

At least not by Hollywood.

Tags: Arts and Media by Rob Williams
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My brother Christopher, a professional musician living in Nashville, Tennessee, is fond of saying that truly great songwriting is only obtained through intense suffering and personal pain.

While I have disputed his statement over the years, I grudgingly will admit that, in the case of a new sonic project from one of the Mad River Valley’s most prolific and hardest-working musicians, my brother may very well be dead on.

Let’s say you’ve been through a rough personal patch, and need to figure out some way of making sense of it all.

Many of us embrace therapy of one sort of another – a healthy response, to reach out and seek some support.

Multi-talented musician James Kinne of Fayston practices his own form of personal therapy.

But first, an aside.

To say that Kinne is perhaps the biggest holistic musical talent in the Mad River Valley – as an instrumentalist, a writer, a vocalist, and a producer with some remarkable ears – is probably a bald understatement (and I speak from personal experience, having performed with him for several years now.)

Simply put, Kinne makes music. Damn fine music.

From soup to nuts.

Here’s how he works.

He writes all the songs.

He plays all the instruments.

He records and mixes the whole project in his own home Stillwater Studio (with mastering help from Jim Bowen.)

And then, he puts his music out there for the world to hear.

“Aletheia” is Kinne’s third solo effort, and it is easily his most ambitious project to date, comprised of no fewer than seventeen songs.

OK, so back to music and personal suffering.

“Aletheia” is built around the collapse of Kinne’s young marriage several months ago, and his resulting journey towards healing and a deeper understanding of this complicated project we call “living.”

I know what you are thinking. Sounds intense.

And it is.

Yet, Kinne has managed to craft a CD of songs that is hopeful, forward-looking, and manages to be at once deeply personal and big-picture universal.

“This Side Of,” the CD’s first track, kicks off the project with some edgy electric guitar power chording, as Kinne anchors the listener in a transitional moment. “In Spades” and “Games,” tracks 2 and 3, both come out of the gate with some infectiously hooky bass and electric guitar grooves. Kinne has a tremendous ear for melody, and is able to build ear-engaging arrangements around a variety of riffs with ease. Quite impressive.

My favorite track (#7) is a tune called “All I Know,” in which Kinne sings of loss, redemption and moving on. “You could have been the one to save my life, point me in the right direction,” he observes. “I could have been the hero in your life, if not for this lost connection.”

And then the kicker.

“Even though the path was overgrown,” he concludes, “I’d rather have grown old with you…than be alone.”

Indeed.

I could on for pages about the virtues of each of the seventeen songs on this CD.

Suffice to say, Kinne’s writing, his musicianship, and the arranging on this CD are first rate.

A short review can do it little justice.

“Aletheia” has to be heard to be believed.

Listen to the whole record online – for free – and decide for yourself at http://jameskinne.bandcamp.com/.

And then, purchase a copy and support one of the Valley’s finest working musicians.

Tags: Arts and Media by Rob Williams
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Like many young readers growing up in the 20th century, I read Sherlock Holmes as a kid.

I liked the English formality of the story – the cape, the hat, the pipe, the assured but self-effacing wit of the gifted detective.

I even fancied myself as his able if somewhat less studied assistant.

Elementary, my dear Watson, I mean, Williams.

Indeed, London’s Baker Street occupied my young imagination in the same way that Hogwarts Castle, perhaps, does for young readers today.

The new “Sherlock Holmes” film, starring the irrepressible Robert Downey Jr. as the astute English sleuth and Jude Law as his assistant, injects the famous and much-loved series with a renewed vitality. Think Hercule Poirot meets a 19th century Iron Man, helped along by a script that positively crackles, and director Guy Ritchie’s hyper-speedy and occasionally artsy slow-mo editing, which makes 19th century London feel like “The Matrix” on steroids.

The celluloid version finds Holmes and Watson less mentor and apprentice and more collegial equals. In a predictable but smart move, Downey plays Holmes as an ass-kicking and slightly snarky smarty-pants, as interested in thrashing the tar out of much more heavily-muscled gents in the boxing ring as he is in the intricacies of uncovering his subjects’ personal details. The repartee between Holmes and his long-suffering Watson feels a bit forced, in part because Jude Law is a charismatic force of nature in his own right, and must play a restrained second fiddle to Downey’s undeniably magnetic personality.

When the Holmes/Watson duo help Scotland Yard bust Lord Blackwood (symbolic name alert!), a former House of Lordsman-turned-seeming-sorcerer who ensnares beautiful maidens for warlock’s sport, the stage is set for mystery and intrigue. Throw in a sensual and mysterious love interest/adversary, and an unfolding and exotic journey through the streets of working class London, and “Sherlock Holmes” makes for entertaining cinema.

There are problems with the film. The villains – Blackwood and an even more shadowy figure named Professor Moriarty (think sequel – Sherlock, Part 2) – don’t engage with our heroes much, remaining in the shadows far too much to be all that interesting. The love relationship between Holmes and his mysterious girlfriend/adversary never really convinces. The biggest flaw, common in many detective films, is director Ritchie’s constant and somewhat annoying habit of using after-the-fact flashbacks to solve various mysteries for the viewer after they’ve occurred. After the fourth go-round, I began to feel like even more of an idiot than usual.

The film is also lengthy, clocking in at 2 plus hours, but never dull. Action sequences abound, punctuated by a narrative arc that feels surprisingly fresh, combining mystery, science, the occult, and political intrigue. To say more would ruin the Sherlock story.

See it for yourself.

Tags: Arts and Media by Rob Williams
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